Definitely one of the most important books I read in 2019, though certainly a tough one to read in places. It's about sexual predators in Hollywood and how the powerful ones get away with it because the media buys the rights to the story and kills it. Through pay-offs and non-disclosure agreements, the women's stories never get told, and the ones who do manage to tell their stories get discredited and slandered. A lot of this book focuses on Harvey Weinstein and the struggle Ronan Farrow had to break the story at NBC, eventually being fired for his efforts by people trying to cover for Weinstein. A cracker of a book and a seriously important message. 5 stars

Farrow is such an immensely talented writer, it is entirely seamless how he blends the third person view of the spies and his own precarious reporting through the different chapters. He never shies away from delivering the devastating facts of the situation, and is equally unflinching when it comes to addressing how his own personal experiences may taint his point of view in certain places. An ultimately upsetting story because of the truth in it, but such incredible writing that I know I will be thinking about it for a long time to come. Although, I will admit that every time he mentioned how much he/someone else hated the movie Jackie, my heart hurt just a little.

This books reads like a thriller but sadly is all too true. An incredibly important book about Ronan Farrow's years spent chasing the Weinstein story, and all the ways in which so many women were not only subject to sexual assault but also followed, spied on and smeared by people desperate to cover up the truth.

Briefly, the story of how Farrow went about bringing down Weinstein, and others by implication, is let down by :- a) assumptions of knowledge: we haven’t all worked in the media, so we need help with job descriptions, power structures, jargon, etc and why these things matter. Iain M Banks’ “Matter”, which Ialso read at the time has a helpful character list and glossary, I would have liked those in Farrow’s book too, b) the endnotes being endnotes, and not referenced in the text: I was wondering, “How can he possibly know that when he wasn’t in that meeting ?”, and similar other epistemological questions, because a) I didn’t know there were endnotes, and there’s no indication in the text that there is an endnotes pertaining to that paragraph, I do so like good, old-fashioned footnotes and superscripted numbers, one knows immediately there is a reference, where to find it, and can go there and back quickly. The American way of life, prizing the individual and ego, doesn’t help: it’s not really his fault that the book is a self-hagiography with no praise for the work of others. Ben Macintyre’s “Operation Mincemeat” shows how English people can do investigative work and be considerably less trumpet voluntary on solo ego. I fear an unintended by-product of this book is to reinforce the negative hard-core feminist view of men that we’re all rapists, and when we say we’re not we’re in denial. No, we’re not, and I’m not in denial: I, and many other men, have not forced ourselves on people, have asked before doing things, and listened to “No”. A better solution would be to filter out the narcissists and non-malefient psychopaths before they get to positions of power, or to note such behaviour and not vote for them in the first place, rather than assuming half the planet behaves like that.